Gummint workers abusing credit cards

When I was in Washington DC during the 1970s, both in my job as a congressional aide and when I was writing columns I used to read a lot of GAO reports (it was the General Accounting Office then, and they've renamed it, reflecting more hope than reality, the Government Accountability Office), and most of them were really excellent, documenting problems or abuses in government offices and suggesting ways to improve the situation. But there was an interesting pattern. Many of the reports read something like: "We identified these problems in our report 7 years ago and when we reported again 3 years ago little or nothing had improved and now things are even worse." The GAO did a good job of identifying problems but the agencies never seemed to improve their performance -- not surprisingly since they were not punished except by the embarrassment of a report.

The pattern seems constant. As this Register editorial notes, abuse of government credit cards was identified as a serious problem at least as long ago as 2001, and the problem remains, according to the GAO report. My favorite is the Forest Service employee who managed to write "convenience checks"totaling more than $500,000 over a five-year period to her live-in boyfriend, who used the money to feed his gambling habit. Pretty convenient.

Wasted on weapons

Yesterday the Government Accountability Office released a report on weapons systems, noting that cost overruns are running at almost $300 billion, and delivery almost two years behind. The real scandal, however, as this Register editorial (alone in the country,to my knowledge, let me know if you find anything like it elsewhere) explains, is that most of these weapons systems are being acquired at all. The weapons acquisition system is still stuck in the Cold War, buying complex and expensive weapons systems suited for confronting the Soviet Union that are pretty much useless against a stateless cross-border terrorist outfit (or outfits, it's not necessarily clear). That's because the system is so politicized, more geared to pleasing constituencies in as many congressional districts as possible than to the real defense needs. If we had any sense, as Ivan Eland put it to me, we'd spend it on Special Forces and Predator drones. But that doesn't buy votes or flatter congresscritters.

Think we're an empire in decline?